Sergei Rachmaninoff quotes

Sergei Rachmaninoff was a Russian composer, pianist, and conductor, renowned for his emotionally rich and technically demanding music. His works, including piano concertos and symphonies, are celebrated for their lyrical melodies and expressive depth. He remains a towering figure in classical music and a symbol of Russian Romanticism. Here are 12 of his quotes:

Opinion in all parts of the world would agree that Rachmaninoff is the most complete of living masters of the instrument; his technique is comprehensive, and he is, of course, musical to his bone's marrow. Most important of all, he is a composer, and for this reason he is able to approach a work as none of his pianist contemporaries can approach one – that is, from the inside, as an organic and felt creative process. (Sergei Rachmaninoff)
The virtuosos look to the students of the world to do their share in the education of the great musical public. Do not waste your time with music that is trite or ignoble. Life is too short to spend it wandering in the barren Saharas of musical trash. View quote
Sergei Rachmaninoff
I feel like a ghost wandering in a world grown alien. I cannot cast out the old way of writing and I cannot acquire the new. I have made an intense effort to feel the musical manner of today, but it will not come to me. View quote
Sergei Rachmaninoff
My dear hands. Farewell, my poor hands. View quote
Sergei Rachmaninoff
A good conductor ought to be a good chauffeur; the qualities that make the one also make the other. They are concentration, an incessant control of attention, and presence of mind; the conductor only has to add a little sense of music. View quote
Sergei Rachmaninoff
Although it may seem incredible, this cure helped me. At the beginning of the summer I began to compose... New musical ideas began to stir with me-far more than I needed for my concerto. By the autumn I had finished the Adagio and Finale... The Two movements I played... at a charity concert... They had a gratifying success... By the Spring I had finished the first movement of the concerto... Out of gratitude, I dedicated it to Nikolay Dahl. View quote
Sergei Rachmaninoff
Music is enough for a lifetime, but a lifetime is not enough for music. View quote
Sergei Rachmaninoff
I can respect the artistic aim of a composer if he arrives at the so-called modern idiom after an intense period of preparation...Such composers know what they are doing when they break a law; they know what to react against, because they have had experience in the classical forms and style. Having mastered the rules, they know which can be violated and which should be obeyed. But, I am sorry to say, I have found too often that young composers plunge into the writing of experimental music with their school lessons only half learned. Too much radical music is sheer sham, for this very reason: its composer sets about revolutionizing the laws of music before he learned them himself. View quote
Sergei Rachmaninoff
Especially dangerous on the musical front in the present class war. View quote
Sergei Rachmaninoff
The new kind of music seems to create not from the heart but from the head. Its composers think rather than feel. They have not the capacity to make their works exalt - they meditate, protest, analyze, reason, calculate and brood, but they do not exalt. View quote
Sergei Rachmaninoff
It is as a composer that his name will live longest. He was the last of the colourful Russian masters of the late 19th cent[ury], with their characteristic gift for long and broad melodies imbued with a resigned melancholy which is never long absent. (Sergei Rachmaninoff)
Technically he was highly gifted, but also severely limited. His music is well constructed and effective, but monotonous in texture, which consists in essence mainly of artificial and gushing tunes accompanied by a variety of figures derived from arpeggios. The enormous popular success some few of Rakhmaninoff's works had in his lifetime is not likely to last, and musicians never regarded it with much favour. View quote
Sergei Rachmaninoff